Arpaio: Obama birth certificate is a fraud

posted at 9:15 am on March 2, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio held a news conference yesterday to release the results of a “deep dive” into the question of whether Barack Obama’s birth certificate was genuine or a fraud. Surprisingly, after having teamed up with WND, Arpaio declared that the birth certificate and Obama’s Selective Service registration are fraudulent. The local NBC affiliate and the Arizona Republic covered the event:

Arpaio and his team answered questions about jurisdiction by claiming that a fraud taking place in Maricopa County means that local law enforcement would have to investigate it. However, if the fraud originated in someplace outside of Arizona, that technically would be the jurisdiction of the FBI, not Arizona. At some point Obama would have to submit an affadavit of eligibility to the state of Arizona for his 2012 re-election bid, and if that was fraudulent, then it would be a state matter.

However, in the massive effort to investigate the birth certificate, Arpaio and his “cold case posse” overlooked one detail:

The investigation relied on volunteers working with an electronic copy of the president’s birth certificate, which is available online, and pointing out inconsistencies with the electronic document. A representative with the Hawaii Attorney General’s Office said no one from the Sheriff’s Office ever requested to inspect or collect documents related to the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate.

I’m no Columbo, but wouldn’t the first step in investigating a potentially fraudulent birth certificate be to check with the issuing authority to see if it matches their records? The state in Hawaii has twicevalidated Obama’s published birth records, and the Honolulu Advertiser published a notice of Obama’s birth the week these records say it happened, a rather significant piece of contemporaneous evidence that investigators would normally find interesting. Seems to me that an “investigation” might have would-be detectives talking with these officials to see what they know, or at least asking the state to recheck their records.

Sadly, this won’t stop the flow of e-mails we’ve been receiving since yesterday afternoon by people convinced that a President who can’t figure out supply and demand in gas prices can put together such a vast conspiracy to hoodwink the American people that it involves elected officials in the state of Hawaii and time travel to put a birth notice in the local paper in 1961. Have fun storming the castle, but the rest of us would rather work on reality-based issues.

Update: A good reminder from commenter Tom Servo: “[I]f you remember Rathergate, you will remember that all document certification professionals agree that a copy of an original can *never* be certified as an original or a fake, since too many uncertainties are created by the duplication process. Only the original can be certified; the failure to ask to see the original is pretty good proof that this commission was a joke right from the get-go.” Indeed. One would think professional “investigators” would know this.

Correspondence released by the White House shows that Obama wrote a letter on White House stationary on April 22, 2011, authorizing the release of the original birth certificate.

It said, “I am writing to request two certified copies of my original certificate of live birth. With this letter, I hereby authorize my personal counsel, Ms. Judith Corley of Perkins Coie in Washington, D.C. to act on my behalf in providing any additional information or paying any fees required by the Department of Health to fulfill my request. Ms. Corley is also authorized to make any necessary arrangements for delivery of the certified copies from your office.”

That same day, Corley asked the state health director in Hawaii to waive its usual rules and release the original “long form” birth certificate.

“Waiver of the Department’s policy in this instance would allow my client to make a certified copy of his original birth certificate publicly available and would also relieve the burden currently pbeing placed on the Department of Health by the numerous inquiries it receives from the media and others relating to my client’s birth record,” wrote Judith Corley, an attorney at the firm.

Corley, who is based in Washington, apparently traveled to Hawaii. She said in the letter that she would “be coming to your offices to pick up the copies of the certificates.”

On April 25, Loretta Fuddy, the director of health in Hawaii, replied to Obama that she had the authority to approve the release of birth records. “Through that authority, in recognition of our status as President of the United States, I am making an exception to current departmental policy which is to issue a computer-generated certified copy.

“We hope that issuing you these copies of your original Certificate of Live Birth will end the numerous inquiries received by the Hawaii Department of Health to produce this documents. Such inquiries have been disruptive to staff operations and have strained State resources,” Fuddy wrote.

She enclosed the copies Obama requested and said, “I have witnessed the copying of the certificate and attest to the authenticity of these copies.”

Blowback

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If you are reading this, long after it has fallen off the HotAir main page, please contact your Representative and your Senators, and ask them to fulfill their Constitutional obligation, under Section 3 of the 20th Amendment, to ensure that

Primary source records for both Barack Obama and Joe Biden should be sent directly to members of Congress, and inspected by both those members of Congress and profesionals (preferably from the Cold Case Posse) who are trained to verify them.

Breitbart asked to interview Sheriff Joe Arpaio on February 29th, and did.

But go ahead and tell us all about how, in your opinion, “Breitbart hated the birther issue. Hated it. Full stop.”

ITguy on March 2, 2012 at 12:08 PM

He hated it. He is now dead. And you shameless birthers have decided to go full retard and try to co-opt his history for going after Obama to now say, “Oh!! What would Breitbart do?!?! He would crusade on this important issue!”

Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his Cold Case Posse investigating Barack Obama’s presidential eligibility have been promising more major revelations since their March 1 press conference, and now another event has been scheduled to unveil new information.

The evidence will include information gathered in the posse’s recent investigative trip to Hawaii as well as an update on the ongoing investigation.

At the March 1 conference, as WND reported March 1, Arpaio and his Cold Case Posse announced there is probable cause that the document released by the White House in April 2011 purporting to be Obama’s original, long-form birth certificate is a forgery. The posse said it also found probable cause that Obama’s Selective Service registration form is fraudulent.

WND reported last month that a letter from Hawaii’s Department of Health verifying Obama’s birth in Honolulu has “opened the door” to some “shocking revelations” the posse is promising to disclose.

Among the details leaked early by Cold Case Posse lead investigator Mike Zullo: There are allegedly several stamps bearing Registrar Alvin Onaka’s name “floating around” inside the Hawaii Department of Health.

“I can’t disclose to you what we’ve discovered, but it’s going to be a shocking revelation at our press conference,” Zullo told Tea Party Power Hour host Mark Gillar in a telephone interview from Hawaii.

Three weeks after the March 1 press conference, Arpaio said there was “tons” more potentially shocking information on Obama in connection with his probe into the president’s eligibility.

Zullo has said he and his investigators have reservations about a letter stamped with Onaka’s name that was sent to Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett as verification of Obama’s Hawaiian birth.

Zullo said the letter fails to list Obama’s birth date, and it’s merely stamped with the registrar’s name, while another set of initials – not Onaka’s – appears next to the signature.